Ten Kingdoms 3D printed Sung Chinese

 In my ongoing dabbling with 3D printed figures the latest test batch is a sample set of cavalry and a few infantry from Ten Kingdoms, as produced under license in the UK by eBay seller Micks Bits.

These chaps are - as printed - slightly large for 15mm, but Mick seems to have found a very good quality resin, robust but with just enough flex not to be as snap-liable as some of the earlier 3D prints I've tested the waters (or resins..) with in the past. 

They are really, really crisp figures, seemingly with more detail emerging the more time you spend trying to paint them properly (!) - another sign that 3D printing even for small scale miniatures continues to come on in leaps and bounds. 

The cavalry even come with pre-printed 3D shields (only one design I think) which you can ink wash and add a bit of paint to and come up with a classic Chinese dragon-face thingy fairly easily.

There is a hard-to-pin-down difference between these CAD-designed sculpts and "normal" sculptor-carved figures, which is perhaps best articulated as these being somehow "cleaner" - but this range at least seems to have managed to get in quite a bit of the artistic elements of "character", with even facial expressions being visibly different on the individual figures. 

Here are the archer and crossbowman stood next to some Lurkio metal castings I bought and painted up at the same time. 

At tabletop distances they are not noticably different in height, but the 3D prints are more well-fed and the difference in amount and sharpness of detail is very noticable. 

I'm working through a fairly major pile of "undercoat these figures outside before the weather turns" at the moment, so quite when I will get around to turning this sample-sized initial purchase into a full army is anyone's guess, but the more time I spend looking at these guys the more convinced I am that I will end up with a Song / Ming / Khitan army using Ten Kingdoms sculpts (designs?) at some point in the near future,. 

 

Bring & Buy .. & Rebase and refurb!

At the recent Attack! show in Devizes I sort of accidentally managed to buy a 15mm Feudal/Medieval Russian army scaled for L'Art de la Guerre.

It was a bring and buy purchase, and I thought it looked close enough to my own painting style to be compatible with my other Eastern European armies, and also that it looked like it was great value - something I immediately rushed off to tell Jason, who I'd travelled to the show with.. only to find that it was one he'd put on the Bring & Buy himself! 

So, with a transaction which could have taken place in the boot of my car managing also to financially support the DDWG club fund, I now owned a Medieval/Feudal Russian army from Essex minis that only needed a bit of rebasing, a few dabs of paint and the addition of some paper banners to become quite an impressive complement to my existing  Hungarians.

And here they are:

Commanders on 40mm round bases

Heavy Cavalry 

Spearmen

"Guard" cavalry - the elite of the army

Follower cavalry - less well armoured than the others

Light Horse javelins or lancers - these will also appear as Serbian Hussars in other armies I think? 

Steppe horse archers

Russian army infantry bowmen

Axemen (foresters)

The cheering peasants who follow the army

Lesser armoured Medium cavalry.

The flags mostly come from Martins Vexillia site plus some from Alex Flags site

I'm dead chuffed with them, however you’d perhaps be surprised at how little I’ve done to them. 

The main visual differences are adding a few flags, and repainting the spears and bows in a much paler) Vallejo Ochre Brown 70.865, then adding a little black line to delineate the metal and wooden parts of the spears, plus the rebasing.

For some reason (that I don’t quite understand), making the spears and bows really stand out with a pale colour makes a big difference - the spears stand out against what are generally darker figures, and the effect of making them "ping" that results is wildly disproportionate to the fairly limited effort involved.

I've already gone back and done this to a good few of my own armies that originally had dark or dull brown “wood” colours for spears and in every case the visual impact is far more than it feels like it should be.

 

A small handful of small Samurai

Quite a few years ago I got a Samurai army painted up professionally by Simon Clarke's Lurkio painting shop - the only army in my collection to be painted by someone else. This was mainly as I really didn't fancy (aka didn't think I was good enough) to paint up a Samurai army and do it justice.

In the process of deciding what figures to get painted though, I did buy a few different ranges before finally settling on Old Glory - and in a recent trawl through the spares box I happened to come across a few baggies of Essex Samurai that I'd considered and then rejected for the army. 

Having succesfully added some much easier to paint Light Infantry Ashigaru archers to the army last year, for some reason when I found these actual Samurai I decided that I might actually have a go at these figures too, and see if I could now paint them to a standard which was something even vaguely close to the pro-paint job on the rest of the Samurai in the army. 

And here they are - almost finished, apart from I am still waiting on some transfers for the large banners.

 

From a distance they actually look reasonable IMO - although its one of those "trick of the eye" things that if you zoom in, or blow up the picture too much they can look rather ropey.

The key techniques I used here were;

• Black undercoat, with the armour being done with a coat of Contrast Blood Angels Red straight onto the black. This seemed to give a good simulation of the red lacquer effect that you can often see in Samurai armour in museums
• The "dots" have been done in Skeleton Bone - which has the advantage of not being anywhere near as harsh as a flat white dots would have been. 
• I have also done a few stripes as well to break up the effect, and not tried to do every dot either - often it is just around the edges of a plate of armour rather than at every piece.
• The uniforms are done in solid normal colours to get a good coverage, and look different to the armour effect of contrast on black. 
• I also snuck in a few minor variations of legging and sock colours to make them slightly less uniform - the handful of "military green" belts also helps a lot with breaking things up too IMO.

As long as you keep at tabletop distances the impression is much better as your mind sort of assumes the dots are in the right places as there are too many of them to take in individually I suspect.

Here are some Ashigaru with naginata and a Samurai commander - again waiting for a transfer for his banner 

I followed the "mostly red" theme with them as well.

Here's a base next to a pro-painted base of Old Glory figures. 

The OG 15's are far heftier, as well as being better painted - so you'd really not want to mix them on a sngle base.  But for a couple of units of different status (in a different command maybe?) I'm still happy with how these have come out. 

FiB Byantine Cavalry

 I've just bitten the bullet and sold off a load of Essex Minis 15mm Byzantines that I've had for the best part of 30 years.  There's nothing really wrong with them, but those Essex Early (Justinian) Byzantine cavalry figures are just so  dammed, well, ubiquitous that I've kinda grown bored of them more than anything else.

Add into that how my painting style has (hopefully) improved in the intervening 30-odd years and the end result has been that I've now embarked on the process of slowly buying and painting up a replacement set of mounted figures for this particular army.   

I've gone with Forged in Battle for them, mainly on the basis that I picked up some Middle/Late Roman almost-Byzantine cavalry a year or so back and really liked how they came out, so fancied adding in a few more from the range. 

And, here they are:

These are pack WE-BE01 "Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Boukellarioi EHC". 

They are billed as a random mix of 12 cavalry plus command, and as seems usual with FiB this means there is an extra command rider (making 13 riders and 12 horses)

There seems to be a bit of a mix of horse poses - not wildly different, just some slight variants of head position - with the standard riders all being the same.

The Command figures are a guy with a windsock standard, a commander with a mace (both pictured here) and a third guy holding a sword aloft, who I have saved for another project TBC. 

As these are being painted for an ADLG army where I'm likely to want to use one or two of these top-drawer units in each of 3 different commands, I chose to paint them up as a "2" and two "1s", so I can differentiate what bases are in which command more easily. 

This is the back of the Commander - the cloaks are done in a couple of Contrast paints, I believe Magos Purple and Shyish Purple - weirdly "Shyish" is the bolder darker colour of the pair. 

The horse armour is done in my traditional style of black undercoat and a Gunmetal drybrush on top. The horses have enough of a raised lip around the edge of the armour to allow a splash of colour to be added - in this case (imperial!) purple. 

You can clearly see the difference in the two units here - one being "blue" and the other "purple". 

This is the back view of the two "red" units - a variety of contrast paints for the horses, including Gore Grunta Fur, Snakebite Leather, Aggaros Dunes and the Warlord Contrast of Holy White on the grey horse. 

The straps were done in Warlord Leather, with a bit of extra "pseudo-blacklining" done with Warlord's Army Painter Dark Tone wash to pick them out a little more clearly - getting the Dark Tone on the armour doesn't really matter, so its fairly easy to flow it round the straps.

The rather spiffy shields are accidental - I used Yanden Yellow on a white base, and the flow of the Contrast paint just created this effect all by itself!

 

 

Xyston Persian Bowmen

 Being unable to resist a bargain, I picked up these Xyston bowmen in a tabletop sale at the recent 1-day ADLG event in Reading.   

They are from the time when PSC were re-casting Xyston figures in Siocast rubbery resin (an experiment which by all accounts seems to have now run its course FWIW).

I reckon that Persians and other "Eastern" armies are perfect to get the best out of Contrast Paints, and these chaps have certainly come out pretty well both in terms of the vibrant "silk-like" colours and also with how the paint has flowed into the deep lines cast into the design of the figures 

Its most noticable from the back, where the leather armour comes up a real treat with a coat of Aggaros Dunes on a white undercoat base layer

With ADLG units being 6/base, this set of 16 also allowed me to eke out two units of light foot archers too

Looking at the army list I'm now not entirely sure where these guys will fit in, but I believe that some of the Successor armies get the odd Persian peasant archer unit too so I'm sure they will make an appearance some day. 

Lots of big moustaches!

My existing Persian infantry are Museum Z-Sculpts, which look great when ranked up in a dense formation but actually don't really stand up especially well when compared directly to the equivalent Xyston sculpts one-to-one

The Museum chaps are at the front, and are noticably slighter in build

More significantly however, the level of detail on the Museum castings is far shallower than on the Xyston sculpts, such that after even a thin layer of sprayed-on white base coat the detail on the Museum figures struggles to take the Contrast paints - whereas the exaggerated depths of the Xyston figures really allow this style of painting to "ping" 

It's not terminal - I'll still happily mix these in the same army, and same unit as well - but it is a reminder that different styles of sculpting work better with different paint techniques.

Zenobia

Forged in Battle make a nice little pack of 15mm Legendary "Dark Age" Commanders, and one of the most legendary is Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra.

The set she is in is the WE-SG01 Dark Ages Assorted Speciality Figures Generals Pack

She has been painted in Contrasts, with the camel being done with the fabulous Aggaros Dunes one. 

Camelphracts

Is it even a real word?  

Who knows in all honestly, but surely every Ancient wargamer will have considered adding a few Parthian Cataphract Camels to their collection at some point in their life? 

Well, at Warfare last year I had a voucher to spend and not all that much I actually wanted, so Forged in Battle ended up being the lucky recipients of my virtual cash and I became the owner of a pack of Camelphracts - which have finally been painted and added to the Bisely cabinet of shame.

They come in a pack of 8 models, which is readonable compared to the normal FiB sets of 12 cavalry as they are much bigger beasts than regular horses.

I then managed to obtain a couple more figures from Dave, as he had some spares allowing me to paint up the 3 bases that you'd need to field a max-sized Camephract force in a 300 point Parthian army for ADLG.

Of course the idea I would ever use a 300 point Parthian army in ADLG is pretty far fetched, but hey, having 9 Camelphracts is much better than having 6 and 2 spares eh?

The odd man out got based up a command stand

All done with contrasts plus drybrushed standard metals.